Most Internet service sites such as electronic commerce (e-commerce) web sites have a multi-tier computing system architecture that partitions the processing of web requests into tiers or stages. Such a multi-tier architecture may, for example, include an edge server stage, an Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) server stage, an application server stage, and a database server stage.
Management systems are typically used to monitor the performance of the computing system and to cause actions to be taken to address performance problems. However, existing management solutions employ only a one-tier management approach. For example, an existing management system provides for dynamic capacity provisioning of the application server tier. However, such an approach does not take into account more than one tier of a multi-tier architecture, nor does it take into account interaction between tiers such as between the application server tier and some other tier.
By way of example, a resource bottleneck can exist in a backend tier such as the database tier. However, since the existing management system employs the one-tier management approach, interaction between the application server tier and the database server tier is not considered. Further, as a result, there is no ability provided by existing management techniques to manage one tier from another tier.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a management approach that is able to take into account multiple tiers of a computing system architecture, and interactions there between, by managing one or more tiers of the computing system from one or more other tiers of the computing system.